The campaign I've been setting up (and may someday actually run) will probably sound somewhat heretical, but here it is.
I've kept the setting, stutterwarp range, polities, and history intact. My maps are nearly the same (although I've been doing some cross checking against Gliese3, but I don't really expect much to change.)
What I've done is add HEPlaR drive, contra grav lifters (no thrust though, just buoyancy), artificial gravity, and psionics.
Reasons: I rather like the feel of stutterwarp, but disliked my parties not being able to (easilly) play the small starship game a la CT or Firefly. The contragrav/HEPlaR was not the only possible fix, but it was the one that sounded the best to me ^_^. I may yet drop the contragrav, but since I wanted artificial gravity the nul-grav seemed a natural extension.
Without spun habitats ships can be smaller, and with CG/HEPlaR those small ships can actually land when they get where they are going.
Because HEPlaR burns fuel, and because I put an upper cap on the size Contragrav can lift (800 dtons or so)... beanstalks are still viable. ROTONs and MHD thrusters however are no longer used (HEPlaR is cheaper and gets better fuel economy) however.
There are no grav vehicles air/rafts, etc, not so much because CG modules are power expensive, but because the tech base simply isn't there to make them small enough to fit small vehicles. So, aircraft and ground effect vehicles are largely unaffected.
Contragrav/Artificial gravity are not an issue for warp discharge because you can't discharge the drive to the ship its mounted on... and discharging to another ship would be the same for them as if their own drive broke down... so no dice there. To keep this from being used as a weapon... I stipulated that the warp discharge requires the 0.1g field to be significantly large. In other words... if the ship can't be IMMERSED in the grav field... it can't discharge. That nifty 800dton volume limit on cg field size helps there too. Artificial gravity has no upper limit, but it only works close to the field plates (i.e., the floor)... so thats ok too.
Since this change instantly invalidated all existing starship designs, and since stutterwarp is a vectorless drive... I went ahead and specified that HEPlaR is a requirement on all starships anyway... because its a lot easier to match vectors with that planet you wish to orbit if you don't have to slingshot around every other planet on the way there. 10-15 g-hours is all thats needed for ships that don't land, but they all have to have it. Ships still slingshot (aka Delta Vega) to conserve fuel, but its there if you need it. That nicely takes up the space that suddenly became free with the loss of all that spun habitat machinery.
What I end up with is larger commercial freighters like the Anjou still running in the 2000 dton range, but a lot of streamlined 200-400 dton couriers show up. Those are the small ships I was after to begin with.
Psionics, I added because I rather like that aspect of traveller to begin with. I use Babylon 5 as a model for how it interfaces with society, and then made it much more rare than what the CT/MT/TNE/T20 books would seem to indicate. I've got homebrewed/amalgumated rules on those too.
There it is. A tad off the beaten path perhaps... but its the one I'm playing with at the moment. Its not *quite* 2300, but its close enough for what I'm after.
I've kept the setting, stutterwarp range, polities, and history intact. My maps are nearly the same (although I've been doing some cross checking against Gliese3, but I don't really expect much to change.)
What I've done is add HEPlaR drive, contra grav lifters (no thrust though, just buoyancy), artificial gravity, and psionics.
Reasons: I rather like the feel of stutterwarp, but disliked my parties not being able to (easilly) play the small starship game a la CT or Firefly. The contragrav/HEPlaR was not the only possible fix, but it was the one that sounded the best to me ^_^. I may yet drop the contragrav, but since I wanted artificial gravity the nul-grav seemed a natural extension.
Without spun habitats ships can be smaller, and with CG/HEPlaR those small ships can actually land when they get where they are going.
Because HEPlaR burns fuel, and because I put an upper cap on the size Contragrav can lift (800 dtons or so)... beanstalks are still viable. ROTONs and MHD thrusters however are no longer used (HEPlaR is cheaper and gets better fuel economy) however.
There are no grav vehicles air/rafts, etc, not so much because CG modules are power expensive, but because the tech base simply isn't there to make them small enough to fit small vehicles. So, aircraft and ground effect vehicles are largely unaffected.
Contragrav/Artificial gravity are not an issue for warp discharge because you can't discharge the drive to the ship its mounted on... and discharging to another ship would be the same for them as if their own drive broke down... so no dice there. To keep this from being used as a weapon... I stipulated that the warp discharge requires the 0.1g field to be significantly large. In other words... if the ship can't be IMMERSED in the grav field... it can't discharge. That nifty 800dton volume limit on cg field size helps there too. Artificial gravity has no upper limit, but it only works close to the field plates (i.e., the floor)... so thats ok too.
Since this change instantly invalidated all existing starship designs, and since stutterwarp is a vectorless drive... I went ahead and specified that HEPlaR is a requirement on all starships anyway... because its a lot easier to match vectors with that planet you wish to orbit if you don't have to slingshot around every other planet on the way there. 10-15 g-hours is all thats needed for ships that don't land, but they all have to have it. Ships still slingshot (aka Delta Vega) to conserve fuel, but its there if you need it. That nicely takes up the space that suddenly became free with the loss of all that spun habitat machinery.
What I end up with is larger commercial freighters like the Anjou still running in the 2000 dton range, but a lot of streamlined 200-400 dton couriers show up. Those are the small ships I was after to begin with.
Psionics, I added because I rather like that aspect of traveller to begin with. I use Babylon 5 as a model for how it interfaces with society, and then made it much more rare than what the CT/MT/TNE/T20 books would seem to indicate. I've got homebrewed/amalgumated rules on those too.
There it is. A tad off the beaten path perhaps... but its the one I'm playing with at the moment. Its not *quite* 2300, but its close enough for what I'm after.
. This is a good excuse for the players to go places.
